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Whatever magic has powered Mayor Pete to atop the Iowa polls was seldom in evidence last night.
Maybe the way to handle a ten-candidate debate is to scrap the debate stuff. That’s pretty much what last night’s moderators from NBC and The Washington Post did, posing so many questions—many of them, refreshingly, not cheap shots—to the candidates that the evening at times resembled a quiz more than it did a debate.
That presented a particular challenge to some of the wonkier candidates: Would they come off as relatable humans or spiritless academic decathletes? (Democrats who remember Michael Dukakis’s presidential candidacy know where that latter option leads.) And that’s the trap into which Pete Buttigieg toppled, enumerating such goals for national focus as the quest for a carbon-neutral farm. Echoes of Dukakis’s recommendations for agrarian policy —“Belgian endive”—tolled dimly, but grimly.
Aware that his polling among African Americans turns up virtually no support, and knowing that his homosexuality could dampen older blacks’ inclination to vote for him, Buttigieg averred that his support for equal rights was, among other things, rooted in scripture—presumably the way to win over churchgoing black seniors. We’ll see.
Whatever magic has powered Mayor Pete to atop the Iowa polls was seldom in evidence last night. He appeared at once a little frightened—waiting for attacks that (almost) didn’t come—and over-prepared. When the attacks on him finally started to fly, they didn’t come from the top tier of candidates, but from the B Team (Amy Klobuchar) and the D Team (Tulsi Gabbard). While Gabbard’s foreign and military policy comes complete with bizarre affinities for authoritarians like Narendra Modi, she was right that Buttigieg did say that the U.S. should consider sending troops to Mexico. We must assume he didn’t mean like it did in 1916, when Black Jack Pershing chased down Mexican revolutionaries near the border, or like it did in 1846, when Winfield Scott took Mexico City and compelled Mexico to give up California and the Southwest. But said it he did.
Of the two children of left-wing professors on the stage, Buttigieg had a bad night and Kamala Harris had a very good one, indeed—returning to the form she showed in the first debate. I don’t think she was the best presidential material on that platform, but she might well be the best candidate to take on Donald Trump on a debate stage. Her answers, while not shunning policy in the least, related those policies to the lives of real people better than any of her rivals’ answers. Asked why she supported six months of paid parental leave, in contrast to Klobuchar’s three, she responded by talking about how women are having children later in life, how they often have to take care of their kids and their aging parents simultaneously, what that does to their work lives and their families’ economic fortunes. It was a great answer that came off as more grounded in the current realities of Americans’ lives than anything else heard on that stage last night. That’s the kind of answer that Elizabeth Warren can deliver, too, but Harris, when she’s on, does it better, partly through a manner that’s a little more street and a little less dry than Warren’s. Warren can fall into the wonk trap, though when she’s on her game—and when she talks a little more slowly than she did last night—she can stress the human element, too. But Harris has a touch of earthiness that no other Democratic candidate can equal, as in her answer on Donald Trump’s wooing of Kim Jong Un: “With all due deference to the fact that this is a presidential debate,” she began, “Donald Trump got punked.” The balance between her qualifying opening clause and her blunt declarative assertion was a thing of beauty. If manner were all, Harris would be a great president.
Warren, in her closing, tacked against the charge that she seeks to divide Democrats, extolling, by contrast, the many good ideas from her fellow candidates, and zeroing in on the systemic corruption that keeps such ideas from becoming laws. That looks like a good way for her to shed some of the baggage of being a “divider” while still maintaining her sharp anti-plutocratic focus.
Bernie, meanwhile, continues to impress. While still plainly disinclined or unable to stop bringing all his answers around to the outrage of economic inequity, he’s become a tad self-conscious about it, and is offsetting what might be viewed as his justifiable monomania with genuine humor.
As for the others—well, public appearances are not Joe Biden’s friend.